This footed bowl and teapot are both composed simply of circles and inverted cones. Through her training at the Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1923, designer Margarete Heymann-Marks Löbenstein (Grete Marks) was familiar with the Modernist approach to both craft and fine arts. Bauhaus students were taught to think in terms of basic shapes, and Marks’s teapot and footed bowl show this characteristic reduction to a simple geometry through their form and surface design. As Modernists in the strictest definition of the word, Bauhaus designers saw themselves as creators of a “Machine Age” aesthetic, free from tradition and able to explore new materials and forms compatible with mass production.
After her formal training, Marks and her husband founded a ceramics factory that successfully sold Modernist designs across Germany, the USA, and England through the 1920s. Under increasingly bad economic conditions and in danger as a Jewish woman, Marks was forced to abandon her factory to the National Socialists (Nazis) and flee with her family to England.